<Advanced Beastiary> by Green Ronin is a 256 page monster template supplement that retails for $18.00. This massive tome provides the harried gamesmaster with over 100 templates that can decrease a targets CR by up to ?4 or increase it up to +6.

There are two chapters in this product. The first chapter is entitled <A Monstrous Toolkit> and it discusses how templates can be used, how to apply them, how to create your own templates, altering templates and guidelines for adding multiple templates. There is also a rating system for the difficultly of the templates in this book; they are defined as easy (a minute or two), moderate (up to fifteen minutes to apply) or difficult (takes quite a while).

The second chapter is roughly 230 pages in length and is filled with templates. Each template has a description, the template, a using the XXX or variant rule and a sample templated creature.

My top five favourites of each category are as follows:

Easy (1):
Cave Creature ? Adapts creatures to survive in the darkness of the Underdark.
Flesh Plant ? Makes blood spilling creatures with a plant-like shape but with soft fleshy parts.
Fortune Blessed Creature ? Makes a creature lucky, as if blessed by the gods of fate.
Metal Clad Creature ? a quick way to add armour and resistance to a creature, like an iron roper or a platinum fire beetle or a silver naga.
Ravenous ? make a cannibal creature.

Moderate (2):
Clockwork Creature ? convert any creature into a mechanical one.
Dread Vampire ? essentially builds a Vampire lord that can boss around other vampires.
Dread Zombie ? essentially makes a Zombie lord that can boss around other zombies.
ID Ooze ? Makes oozes intelligent.
Ooze Creature ? Makes creatures into oozes. With the previous you could make an intelligent cryohydra that was composed of ooze.

Difficult (3):
Creature Swarm ? Converts large creatures into a swarm of little creatures.
Gigantean Creature ? used for making ridiculously large monsters
Jotunblood Giant ? An upgrade to the traditional giant types.
Miniature ? for making miniature creatures like the minimals in the Monster Manual 2 (1st edition)
Monstrous Lycanthrope ? who doesn?t want to make a Tarrasque that is an Ancient Red Weredragon?

I?ve used almost all of the level 1 templates in my campaign now, most of the level 2s and a good mix of level 3s. This is the first template book I open when I set about to write an adventure or plan my campaign. This product is essentially all OGC and hopefully it means that you will see these templates appearing in an adventure near you.
The layout and editing are superb.

LIKED: A huge range of options for adjusting your monsters.
The layout and organization makes the product easy to use.